Embrace your inner 4-year-old and climb up into the padded seat of a big truck cab. Or a police car.

This Saturday, the Baltimore Museum of Industry has its big truck day event, which should draw in kids from all ages like the Pied Piper.

The event lasts from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., with lots more outdoor entertainment and half-price admission to the museum itself.

And while you’re around town, catch some lunch or an early dinner on Charles Street during its “Let’s Eat Charles Street” promotion Saturday.  The 300 block of  N. Charles Street will be closed to traffic for an event that features local restaurants, retailers, kids’ activities and live music. Food and drink prices will vary, but admission to the event itself is free. Participating vendors are listed on the event’s website.

And draw on your pencil mustache! John Waters will be visiting Atomic Books on Saturday at 7 p.m. The Baltimore-native film director will be there to sign copies of “Role Models,” available in softcover.

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Today, I’m on the hunt for Woody Harrelson.

“Game Change” is filming at the Tremont Grand, right around the corner from TDR’s offices, and security and set people have told us that Harrelson’s supposed to make an appearance Monday to shoot a scene.

The made-for-TV movie about the 2008 presidential election is filming around the state, and has made its way to downtown Baltimore. Harrelson plays Steve Schmidt, a senior campaign adviser to Sen. John McCain. Also set to star in the movie is Julianne Moore, Ed Harris, and a bunch of other people.

In case you’ve been walking around Charles Street lately and noticed the orange and black “Denali” signs, it’s for Denali Productions Inc., a commercial production company. If you’re curious, president Bob Carmichael’s site is here, showing the array of other work they’ve done.

While a few of us TDR staff walked right through a scene shortly before 11 a.m., none of the actors were him. One set man quipped that  Harrelson hadn’t woken up yet, while a security guard told us that we may not get to see him on account of his entourage.

The day is still early, Mr. Harrelson.

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It’s back again! The Maryland Film Festival is here for our viewing pleasure Thursday through Sunday. Tickets are $10 for most screenings, so get them soon after checking out the great schedule.

John Waters will be presenting “Domaine,” while Animal Collective presents “Boxer’s Omen.” So, if nothing else, you’ll see some local celebrities there, and Harry Belafonte for the closing night special documentary. Speaking of movies, Belafonte’s very name always evokes this scene in my head.

Now, free comic books. Head to Atomic Books in Hampden to get free comics and to celebrate the debut of the third issue of Mutant. You can also jump over to the Collectors Corner in Parkville for free comics, free pizza, a trivia contest and appearances by comic creators and characters.

And it’s Flowermart this weekend! Both Friday and Saturday, the festival will go on from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. in Mt. Vernon’s parks near the Washington Monument. Check out dance performances, contests, music, parades, food and of course, flowers.

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This gubernatorial campaign season’s going to be a doozie — and it looks like one of the battle grounds will be Maryland’s ability to attract film and television productions.

On Wednesday, Republican candidate and former Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. announced he would invest $7 million in a key state tax credit to help bring back to Maryland the major movie and TV projects that have provided hundreds of jobs. He’s talking about the state’s Film Incentive Fund that in the last four years has been whittled down to about $1 million. In 2005, the fund was allotted $6 million.

The fund allows the state to woo producers by offering them tax credits and other incentives to film here. With less money, it’s harder to attract productions. I recently wrote about the fund’s impact when Maryland failed to snag Hollywood’s first lacrosse movie.

Like a good politician, Ehrlich used the press conference as a chance to cast blame on his competitor, Gov. Martin O’Malley. Apparently it’s all his fault that the state’s unemployment rate has doubled since 2006 (Ehrlich’s last year as governor). I thought the national recession had a lot to do with it but then again, what do I know? I’m just a business reporter.

Sarcasm aside, here’s what Ehrlich had to say at the press event, held at Hunt Valley’s Renegade production studios:

“Cutting this tax credit is no different than cutting jobs,” he said. “We all benefit from the jobs production companies bring to Maryland, and the money they spend on salaries, hotel rooms, restaurant meals, transportation, security, even dry cleaning and entertainment. It’s an expenditure that produces a huge return on a small investment, and we ought to return Maryland to the forefront of TV and film production. When I’m governor, we will.”

When it comes to the arts — even if it benefits businesses — campaign promises are especially hard to keep. If elected, do you think Ehrlich can do this?

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A few months ago I told you that Hollywood’s first lacrosse movie might be filmed in Maryland. In my story I also said Maryland’s depleted film incentives fund could keep it from winning the movie, but that the producers were hopeful something could be worked out.

Well you can hold that thought.

I touched base with producer Todd Harris on Thursday and it looks like Maryland is out of the picture (no pun intended).

“I really haven’t gotten the investment response I’d hoped for from MD yet, and the state’s resources remain lean by comparison to some other states,” Harris said in an e-mail.

There’s no way around it. That’s kind of embarrassing that a state considered a hotbed of lacrosse — and that has lacrosse as its official team sport — couldn’t score Hollywood’s first movie on the sport.

One solace is it’s not all about money — Harris said the movie has gained traction in recent months with Native American investors, and they will likely shoot the movie on a reservation in the Northeast.

That’s actually really good news for the Native American community — it did invent the sport after all. Now not only do we get a lacrosse movie featuring a Native American underdog tale, but a reservation will likely get the economic benefits of hosting the movie production.

Harris did say Crooked Arrows will still most likely be casting in Maryland, but we don’t know yet when those audition dates will be.

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William Mack and Ja’Mal Wills, J&W Sensations

Last year I wrote about Baltimore students who were involved in a national competition for young entrepreneurs as part of the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship program.

NFTE was founded in New York City’s South Bronx in 1987 as a dropout prevention program and provides entrepreneurship curriculum to middle schools and high schools in low-income communities. The students learn how to start a business, from writing a business plan to implementation. NFTE’s success caught the eye of documentary filmmaker Mary Mazzio and Mazzio’s documentary on the 2008 competition debuts this week in Baltimore.

“Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon,” premiers on Wednesday at 7 p.m. at The Brown Center at the Maryland Institute College of Art (tickets are free but must be reserved in advance.) The film will also air on Black Entertainment Television (BET) at noon on Sunday, Feb. 7.

The Baltimore students in the film are Jamal Wills and William Mack, now seniors at Patterson High School, who started J&W Sensations, a lotion company, and Anne’ Montague, a recent graduate of Forest Park High School who founded Inamoratos Dance, a nonprofit that offers affordable dance lessons to  people between the ages of 10-21.

Baltimore sent two students (Alayna Albertie and Keenen Geter) last year to the national competition and four out of the 28 national finalists were from Maryland. The first, second and third place winners were from California, Illinois and Massachusetts, respectively.

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Maryland jockey Grant Whitacre will be portraying Paul Feliciano in the movie “Secretariat,” which is slated to be released in the fall. Feliciano rode the 1973 Triple Crown winner in his first two career starts as an apprentice, before the more experienced Ron Turcotte took over.

Secretariat is considered by many to be the best race horse of all time. Mayhem Pictures, with the backing of Walt Disney Pictures, is producing the movie. The companies have collaborated before on sports pics like “Miracle” and “The Rookie.”

(Side note: I have yet to see a sports movie where I don’t get a little weepy — especially a Disney one. When I saw “Miracle” in the theater I was frantically dabbing at my eyes during that final big scene and praying nobody noticed. Those folks at Disney definitely have my number. So, I will be seeing Secretariat when it’s released, it will get a little dusty in the theater and this time I’m bringing Kleenex.)

Whitacre got the job after responding to a casting call in Timonium last year. He got to rub shoulders with some pretty impressive Hollywood company during last fall’s shoot — Diane Lane is playing the owner Penny Chenery (the housewife-turned-champion-breeder), and John Malkovich is cast as the trainer Lucien Laurin.

As for Whitacre in real life, the 24-year-old had a breakout year in 2009. After battling injuries for the first three years of his career, the former Atholton High School baseball player established himself as a reliable rider, ranking seventh in the overall standings last year at Pimlico and Laurel Park. In September, he had the signature win of his career with a victory aboard Sumacha’hot in the Jim McKay Maryland Million Classic.

This weekend, Whitacre was diagnosed with a small hairline fracture in his lower back after being tossed from his mount, Blue Wren, in Saturday’s race at Laurel. He is expected to miss two to six weeks.

Another Maryland-based rider, Tom Foley, will play exercise rider Jim Gaffney in the movie.

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Maybe a bunch of college students getting together to watch porn is not the craziest thing you ever heard of. But how about when a university hosts the event?

Saturday Hoff Theater at University of Maryland will air a midnight showing of “Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge.” School officials have said the showing offers students an alternative to late night drinking.

Here’s a description of the film from Hoff’s Web site: “Pirate hunter Captain Edward Reynolds and his blond first mate, Jules Steel, return where they are recruited by a shady governor general to find a darkly sinister Chinese empress pirate, named Xifing, and her group of Arab cutthroats, whom are trying to resurrect the late Victor Stagnetti, the world’s most feared pirate, from the grave to bring on world domination. Planned Parenthood will provide a brief introduction.”

In a radio interview this morning, Lisa Cunningham, program coordinator for Hoff, defending the theater’s choice to air the film saying it was the student committee’s unanimous choice to show the XXX-rated film. She also assured that taxpayer dollars, contrary to some protester’s beliefs, were not paying for the film. Instead, the university gets the films for free and the ticket sales cover wages and the cost of keeping the building open.

What are your thought on the choice? Is this just allowing free speech and freedom of expression at a public university? Or has the theater crossed a line?

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Most people know Fells Point’s Recreation Pier as the filming location for the NBC series “Homicide: Life on the Street,” which ran from 1993 to 1999.

But in 2006, the historic structure was also part of the set for “Step Up,” a fantastically teenaged guilty pleasure of a movie about competitive dance crews, and again for “Step Up 2: The Streets.”

Both were set in Baltimore, and both, curiously, involve scenes in which street dancers vandalize the Maryland School of the Arts.While reporting on today’s story about the Recreation Pier, Daily Record photographer Rich Dennison and I got a brief tour of the building and saw the leftovers of the filming sets for the Step Up films.

In the tradition of On the Record blog posts about forgotten movie sets, here’s a slideshow of interior shots of the Recreation Pier, standing in as the Maryland School of the Arts.

ROBBIE WHELAN, Business Writer

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